Borgesian Architecture? Documents, Maps, and Files of a Fictional Architecture

From BLDGBLOG:

A group project by three students at Columbia’s GSAPP—Yuval Borochov, Lisa Ekle, and Danil Nagy, under the guidance of professor Ed Keller—Protocol Architecture was pitched as a team that “investigates potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents. These document sets create evidence for future scenarios that string together a specific history of political, social, and technological developments.” As such, Protocol’s work becomes less architectural than it is archival:
By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.
The resulting fictional archives—or “fabricated histories,” as the architects describe them—allowed the group to question “the role that fact and evidence plays in how we perceive our own history and our place as designers within it.”

If this isn’t a Borgesian idea, I don’t know what is: creating fictional future documents as archaeological/historical evidence for the design purposes of the present. As Manaugh observes, as fruitful or not this idea might be from an actual architectural standpoint, it offers wonderful possibilities for storytelling:

And that’s the rub: at the end of the day, most architecture students—unsurprisingly—think they have to take this stuff, put it all together, and produce something clearly definable as a building. But the research, in many cases, is more worthy of attention (and well worth the time it takes to produce it). In other words, the research—the preliminary material, the periphery, the narrative excess, the unwanted fringe—is very often most provocative before it becomes a building, when that inchoate mass of possible future projects, storylines, techniques, and more offers a million alternative directions in which we have yet to go.

I only say this here because it is extraordinarily exciting to see a project like this, that out-fictionalizes the contemporary novel and even puts much of Hollywood to shame—to realize, once again, that architecture students routinely trade in ideas that could reinvigorate the film industry and the publishing industry, which is all the more important if the world of private commissions and construction firms remains unresponsive or financially out of reach. The Nesin Map alone, given a screenwriter and a dialogue coach, could supply the plot of a film or a thousand comic books—and rogue concrete mixtures put to use by nefarious underground militaries in Baghdad is an idea that could be optioned right now for release in summer 2013. HBO should produce this immediately.

Disappointments…Alastair Reynold’s Terminal World

Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space sequence is among my favourite SF ever. Few, if any, works of SF can match them in sheer scope. Wonderful universe, populated by intriguing peoples and aliens, with a terrifyingly immense back story. Now, for some reason, Reynolds has chosen to leave space opera to one side and move on, rather unsuccesfully, to China Mieville territory.

The story takes place on a planet where shifting zones affect the function of technology, ranging from completely forbidding to hi tech. Quillon, an escapee from the higher levels of Spearpoint, a city spirally built around a massive spire that pierces the clouds, aided by a woman called Meroka, has to go into exile in the lo tech zones outside Spearpoint, hunted by his people for the secrets he knows.

In terms of world-building, Reynolds does a pretty good job, as usual, casually revealing aspects of life on the planet and giving glimpses of its history. However, that’s pretty much all we get. Unlike his former novels, Reynolds does not fully explore his world. He gives us tantalising hints (i.e. the Bane sequence) but never follows up on them. As a result, the narrative is not really fleshed out. It is a very linear construct, uneven and ultimately disappointing. At the same time, Reynolds’ world feels very derivative. Heavily influenced by Mieville, Terminal World is also reminiscent of Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World, Vernon Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, Iain Banks’ Matter and Bob Shaw’s Ragged Astronauts trilogy in both concepts and overall mood.

Quillon is a very uninteresting character, definitely not strong enough to carry this story forward. The impetus is provided by secondary characters who remain underdeveloped, as does the story to which they hold clues. Reynolds has never been praised for either his characterisation or his dialogue, both of which remain formulaic and stilted, even more so in a novel that lacks the drive and scope of his previous ones.
There are some great grotesques and a host of bizarre creations like the Mad Machines, the Skullboys or Tulwar but they are too derivative of Mieville to give the novel enough life.

Terminal World reads more like an unfinished exercise than a fully fledged, complete novel. Meandering and without focus, it ends up being nothing more than a catalogue of half-interesting scenes in a half-constructed world.